Posts by Tom Semmens
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I would also welcome another agency than the Police making decisions about prosecution, given their repeated failure over many years to reflect the most basic common sense over whether there is enough evidence to bother lodging a case with the courts.
Be careful what you wish for. Using the police to silence your opponents is a favourite tactic in authoritarian tin-pot "democracies" like Singapore. The police are justifiably very reluctant to become regular participants in our electoral process. Banks may be a particularly egregious example of weaseling, but given the way politicians are fond of throwing to the police all sorts of complaints about often trifling breaches of the law for purely political reasons the idea that police prosecutions could become major determinants in the outcome of our elections sends a chill down my spine.
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The point isn’t that the ability to import these analogues (or the real McCoy) may be possible now. A regulated trade for legal purposes clearly exists for something like ketamine. The point is it is one thing for a bunch of common gangsters in the quasi-state of Montenegro to operate a website on the fringes of a weak and/or corrupt government. But it is quite another for a respectable, first world, English speaking nation tightly woven in the globalised Anglosphere to suddenly start openly and legally processing and attractively packaging the stuff up for frank recreational consumption on the weekend. I mean, we are a real country with a proper government who are presided over by the Queen of England, for God’s sake, not some loud foreign chap with a penchant for to much gold braid on his uniform. It simply wouldn’t do, and our diplomats and politicians would be told that it simply wouldn’t do in no uncertain terms.
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Have you read the policy? It’s a substantial advance on what we’ve had.
It is clear what the recommendation that dare not speak it’s name is from the regulatory impact statement. But the idea that New Zealand might actually start allowing people to legally manufacture MDMA or cannabis analogues as part of a well regulated regime is pure fantasyland stuff.
Think about it. There is zero chance the Australians would be at all happy with New Zealanders nonchalantly turning up at their borders with legal-in-NZ class B and C drugs about their persons and clogging up their customs services. Or delighted with Australian citizens returning from weekends in the sudden new party meccas of Auckland or Queenstown clearly having been doing things still naughty in the eyes of the Commonwealth of Australia. We’ve all heard of the silk road carry on, how chuffed would our friends overseas be when some dude shows up selling mail order class B and C drugs legally from a .co.nz address? After they recovered from fainting the Americans would probably fire a cruise missile at his warehouse, and that is not to mention what might arrive in the return mail from Mexican drug cartels annoyed at someone stepping on their toes.
The government will undoubtedly use the new regulatory environment suggested to create a more perfect prohibition. Given the trade and diplomatic implications they can hardly do anything else. Anyone who thinks anything different is simply dreaming.
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Given that our Prime Minister has decided that big tobacco is going to make the decision on plain packaging of cigarettes for us, the chances of getting any meaningful reform past the MP for Hawaii and the DEA are zero to none.
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Hard News: Judge Harvey: My part in his downfall, in reply to Robert Fear,
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No one seems to have mentioned this, but I hope everyone knows the good judge was also almost certainly making a very subtle witty allusion to one of the iconic military messages in United States history, that of Oliver Hazard Perry who reported his victory over the British at the battle of Lake Erie in 1813 thus: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours”.
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no one would ever dream of making teachers wear a uniform these days.
Actually I have always thought that this is a capital idea! Mortar boards and gowns, it’ll look just like Hogwarts.
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It’s part of the same long, slow cultural tragedy that sees managerialism eventually destroying the ethos and, well, point of every institution it invades
The point to life saving is saving lives, right? Not when the managers are in charge.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Scott Chris,
my philosophy of education is setting clear educational aims and expectations and measuring the level of attainment relative to those stated aims and expectations.
Except this is not a philosophy of education. It might be a suitable summation of the career goals of an obscure apparatchik in the department of weights and measures, but it is most certainly not suitable as a philosophy of education.
This is a philosophy of education:
“...every person regardless of background or ability had a right to an education of a type for which they were best suited”. And funnily enough it was uttered by a man gifted with much greater wisdom and insight into education than you.
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John Key discussed them in that oddly passive way
I think studying the corporate semiotics of the way John Key speaks repays closer attention. In understanding why he talks in the way he talks, we can perhaps grasp why his government so manages to control the intellectual agenda of a society where a high paying job as a managment bureaucrat in a well-recognised large corporate entity is seen as the ultimate marker of middle class success.